Gone With the War? Ideas Whose Time Has Passed

Victor Davis Hanson

Over the last few months we have heard a litany of politically correct lamentations:
The orcs were too predictably dark in Lord of the Rings, fiction which employed a "good"
North and West against an "evil" East and South. The Somalians of Black Hawk Down were
all black, their American opponents nearly all white. The photo of the three white
firemen at Ground Zero should be transmogrified, through sculpture, into representations
of people of color. A new word -- "Islamophobia" -- is needed to capture a spreading
hatred toward those of Middle Eastern descent. And on and on.

Footage of the burning Twin Towers became increasingly rare on our television screens
-- lest it inflame Americans. And perhaps it was also deemed unwise in that regard to
show too often the pictures of the 19 terrorists, lest someone derive that they were all
male Middle Easterners, or surmise that their comrades in Cuba were not really POWs. Yet
after September 11, such cosmetic efforts at political correctness have been both
recognized and jeered at by the general public. Conventional wisdom suggests that the
present conflict will not affect much the underlying and entrenched ideas beneath this
daily Orwellian assault. But I am not so sure.